5 Scary Truths About the U.S. Department of Agriculture

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is an agency meant to keep our food supply safe, meet the needs of farmers and ranchers, develop markets abroad for agricultural products, and end hunger in the U.S. and abroad. But through questionable policy and repeated hypocrisy, the USDA is instead creating environments where our food becomes contaminated and diseased, farmers cannot earn a living, and, as a nation, we develop health and financial problems.

Americans are faced with an agricultural system that is destroying small farmers and the flavor of our food, and putting agricultural bio-diversity in grave danger—but we we’ll spare you the typical Michael Pollan shpiel here. What we’d like to talk about is how the USDA is permitting animal abuse in slaughterhouses, pushing foods on Americans that make us fat, and overworking and underpaying meat inspectors so they can’t properly do their jobs. This is an essential U.S. agency that is failing the American people.

Hide your kids, hide your wife—here are five scary truths about the USDA that might just make you a bit queasy.

Nearly one million chickens and turkeys are accidentally boiled alive each year in U.S. slaughterhouses.

Yes, you heard right. According to The Washington Post and USDA records, nearly 1 million chickens and turkeys are unintentionally boiled alive each year in U.S. slaughterhouses. This unpleasant reality is the result of fast-moving lines that fail to kill the birds before they are dropped into boiling water.
And now, of course, the USDA is working to finalize a proposal that will permit poultry companies to speed up their processing lines even further, in an aim to make plants more efficient. The USDA inspectors say that much of the animal abuse that goes on inside of these slaughterhouses is a result of the rapid pace at which employees work.
The proposal being finalized by the USDA would revamp inspections in poultry plants and let them increase the maximum line speed in chicken plants from 140 birds per minute to 175 per minute, and in turkey plants from 45 birds per minute to 55 per minute, which would logically increase bird abuse.

The weekend before Labor Day, the USDA quietly announced that chicken produced in the U.S., Chile, or Canada, then processed in one of four Chinese facilities and exported back to the U.S. would be allowed in school meals. The controversial decision came right after officials seized 22 tons of fake beef in a Chinese factory, which was just one instance in of a long line of food safety scares coming out of the country.
According to Politico, the department also “rejected a food safety advocacy group’s petition to ban China from shipping any chicken to the U.S.” Food and Water Watch argued in the petition that Chinese food safety measures are not up to U.S. standards.
Amidst the outcry, the USDA seemed to be attempting to hide its decision from parents. The USDA website stated:
“If, for example, a manufacturer of frozen chicken egg rolls fully assembles the egg rolls in this country, but sources the cooked chicken in the egg rolls from a Chinese processor, the egg rolls are considered ‘domestic’ so long as the Chinese-processed chicken doesn’t comprise more than 49% of the total product."
Many consider this to be a first step toward the USDA legalizing the import of Chinese-grown meat and food products. Keep an eye on that lunch tray, parents.

The “USDA Organic” seal means nothing.

Relaxation of federal organic labeling standards, and an explosion of consumer demand for organic products in the past few years, have helped push the organics market into a multibillion-dollar-a-year business. Organic is the fastest-growing segment of the food industry, The Washington Post reports. And the global organic-food market is expected to grow at an estimated compound annual growth rate of 12.9% to $105 billion in 2015.
But here's the thing: You might not be getting your money's worth when spending all that dough on organic food. There are bizarre examples of non-organic foods being marked "organic." Grated “organic” cheese contains wood starch to prevent clumping; “organic” mock duck contains a synthetic ingredient that gives it a duck-like, stringy texture; and until January of this year, “organic” beer could be made from non-organic hops. In February of this year, ABC News discovered that there is actually no established testing procedurein place to ensure that foods labeled organic are free from synthetic chemicals.
Another challenge of attempting to eat organic by trusting USDA certified organic labels? Although GMO usage not permitted under the National Organic Program, organic certification does not require GMO testing, reports the Non-GMO Project. Thanks for nothing, organic certification.

The USDA warns us about fat, then pushes fatty foods.

In 2009, Domino’s Pizza’s domestic sales had fallen, and a national poll deemed Domino’s pizza “the worst tasting” of all big chain pizza. So a marketing creation of the USDA, deemed Dairy Management, came to Domino’s aid. Dairy Management teamed up with Domino’s and developed a new line of pizzas with 40% more cheese, reports the New York Times. The marketing campaign cost a total of $12 million, which the USDA ended up paying for (there goes your hard-earned tax dollars, everybody).
Consumers loved the cheesier pizza and sales climbed. The only problem? One slice of the pizza contains as much as two-thirds of a day’s maximum recommended amount of saturated fat. And saturated fat has been linked to heart disease and obesity. The irony of it all? The USDA is “the same agency at the center of a federal anti-obesity drive that discourages over-consumption of some of the very foods Dairy Management is vigorously promoting,” points out the NYT.

The task of USDA meat inspectors is daunting, requiring the “visual and manual inspection of every carcass in plants that process thousands, and in some cases tens of thousands, of animals a day,” according to the New York Times.
The USDA’s inspector general put out a report in May of this year which stated that between 2008 and 2011, inspectors noted nearly 45,000 meat inspection violations—including finding fecal matter on carcasses—but suspended operations only 28 times. This disparity would suggest that the USDA inspection system is not up to snuff.
What’s more, the report showed that the USDA inspectors were undertrained. “Even in the presence of government investigators, some inspectors failed to condemn contaminated meat,” reports the NYT.

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